Coal
Coal Coal is the cancer that is killing my nation. coal however is also a major industry in the hillbilly nation. and as such is a major employer of hillbillys. coal mining and its terminology have infested the dialect with terms like "the strip" for a strip mind and "the hole" for a deep mine along with perhaps hundreds of other words describing the devastation of the industry upon the land the people and the culture. i.e. highwall, sulpher water, blacklung, doghole, siltpond, etc. Coal Miners the thing about coal is that no one agree's on what it is and what it does. there is a veritable army of "friends of coal" sporting coal miner and friends of coal license plates, and stickers in the windows of their vehicles. these are the people employed and supported by the coal industry making kingly wages of sums as high as $500 or $600 a week, some who are willing to work as many as 80 or 100 hours a week might even make $900 or $1100 a week, placing them well into the upper crust of the working class, these people are willing to endure broken bones, arthritis, hearing loss and/or tinitus, in order to make these impressive sums of money, many of them ignoring the fact that from these wages they have to pay for their own health insurance as well as the health insurance of the families they love and support as the coal companies that employ them rarely provide this health coverage themselves. amazingly among this devout and hard working army of coal miners terms such as per dium and labor day have not been popularized or widely spread in the culture. however no matter their situation the main thing binding coal miners together and to their industry is that the alternative to doing the work they do is usually some kind of sub minimum wage job with no health insurance and no paid vacation which would not support their families in the lavish style they are accustomed to. Poor People on the opposite side of the debate are the people who actually work the sub minimum wage jobs with no health care and no paid vacation but are opposed to the coal industry because of various pseudo legal practices of the industry at large such as blasting near houses and farms, disrupting the water table by removing large sections of the geological substrate where they mine and introducing sulphur into those water table creating a weak solution of sulphuric acid that stains clothes and hair a dingy red color and renders water from family faucets undrinkable forcing many families to acquire expensive water filters or just buy bottled water at inflated prices to avoid drinking water which they know and remember was once clear and sweet and did not ruin their clothes and hair. Rich People also on the opposing side of the debate are a small section of the population which are affluent, well educated, and have the time to bitch about things that ruin the scenery of the hillbilly nation that they prize so highly, these people are somewhat divided on the issue. on the one hand they want to preserve the beautiful forests and streams that they would like very much to exploit through tourism but on the other hand the practice of strip mining provides them with large sections of relatively flat stable land that they can build on. this group is prone to building apartments and housing developments on reclaimed strip mines as well as sports complexes for the communities they create, not even realizing that they have spent large sums of other peoples money to build houses costing well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars expecting people who make $40,000 or less a year to buy them. they like to build multimillion dollar sportsplexes and atv tourism centers with money taken from county budget so that people who can barely read and don't have access to clean water or proper medical facilities can play basketball at night in a well lit air conditioned building. Money however the main reason that the cancer of coal mining is destroying our nation, the hillbilly nation, is money. money was a concept introduced into the hillbilly nation at first by timber barons who came to rape our majestic and beautiful forest so that mighty trees that had stood for hundred of years in the dense canopy of a wondrous mixed mesophytic forest (the only one of it's kind in north america) might be converted to log jams and floated down the mighty rivers to markets in the cities of the bluegrass of kentucky and the ohio valley. money not only made this possible, it made it easy, a buyer shows up flashing wads of money in sums as massive as perhaps $50 or $100 could purchase the rights to harvest hundreds and hundreds of acres of timber, making millionaires of business men in other states and countries, but the discovery of coal in the hillbilly nation was it's doom men came from all over the world to buy coal rights, companies invested thousands and thousands of dollars to extend railheads into the heart of the hillbilly nation to haul out the minerals excavated there, new buyers showed up flashing their hundred dollar bills and bought up all the rights nearly all the coal in the hillbilly nation leaving hardly any hillbillys with a claim to so much as a right of way into and out of the land they thought they owned. and money continued from then on to be the ruin of the land and the people and the culture of the hillbilly nation, the companies moved right in and set up business and began throwing money everywhere. they bought judges and sheriffs and magistrates and they bought gunmen and guns, to put down the uprisings of hillbillys who suddenly realized abeit far too late that they had gotten screwed in all these dealings going on. and when the uprisings were put down the companies threw money at the defeated people and sent them down into the mines to be maimed and killed or just plain worked to death before they were thrown out in the cold to starve. Divisions but the problem with money is that it can get you whatever you want if you have enough. so therefore hillbillies that managed to get enough money to get the things they wanted, wanted to get the hell away from the hillbilly nation, and if they did stay they built nice houses high on the hill and maybe even dedicated a museum or two in memory of the people who died from all the money floating around, but the problem is that they had their money...and they didn't really care about the people who didn't. therefore money divided the hillbillys into classes, and today it divided the hillbillys into multiple opposing sides, sides of people who want to strip the whole of the coal fields and leave nothing to piss on, and sides of people who want tourists to come by the millions and trample everything into dust, and people who want to stop it all and bomb coal and rich people and coal miners and all back to the stone age, and people who just want to live and be left the hell alone, and all of these sides are opposing, none of these sides agree on any major point therefore, coal just keep on growing and keeps on making more money and keeps learning newer smarter way to spend less money to get more people to do the things that it needs them to do in order to grow and make more money and continue it's cancerous cycle until it has taken everything tere is to take and there is nothing left that will make it money then it will move on, it will leave the land people culture and all impoverished raped and just generally sad as hell Category:coal Category:coal